Recently, I ran the second annual Disney Star Wars Dark Side Half Marathon. It was 13.1 miles of unparalleled contentment, as I got to satisfy my running nerd and Star Wars geek at the same time over the course of several hours. The only problem was motivating myself to train for the run in the first place. In Florida, April is very much "end of season" and, having run several races already since things got rolling back in October, I wasn't all that interested in training hard. So I did what any good tech head would do.

It's a question that I've been musing about ever since I started testing Vi, which its creators call the "first true AI personal trainer." It combines a pair of bio-sensing headphones and an app from Lifebeam, a military biosensor company founded by a pair of former Israeli air force pilots. Lifebeam's side hustle is to take those same sensors and bake them into consumer products like cycling helmets and baseball caps. Here, the company has added that technology to a pair of Bluetooth earphones, along with a raft of other fitness tracking equipment. Buried inside the "halo" that sits around your neck is a six-axis gyroscope, barometer and accelerometer.

The artificial intelligence that we hope will exist in our lifetime is a world away from what's available right now. A thinking computer that knows us better than we know ourselves, and can make us better than we are, is still the stuff of fantasy. But, if our goals are simple and easy to understand, does an AI really need to be that smart to get the job done? It's a question that I've been musing ever since I started testing Vi, which its creators call the "first true AI personal trainer." It combines a pair of bio-sensing headphones and app from Lifebeam, a military biosensor firm founded by a pair of former Israeli air force pilots.